The Translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore” and European Romanticism

ABSTRACT Gottfried August Bürger’s Gothic ballad “Lenore” (1774) is one of the most important textual catalysts of international Romanticism. It was written twenty years before the beginning of the German literary movement in Jena and, unlike many Romantic texts, offers a clear Christian moral doctrine. It was only through the translations, which emerged at the beginning (or at the turning points) of many Romantic traditions, that the ballad acquired its Romantic potential. The analysis of the “Lenore Year” in England (1796), Giovanni Berchet’s “Lettera Semiseria” in Italy (1816), and selected examples from Slavic Romanticism reveal the essential challenges that “Lenore” poses to European literature: Bürger’s interjections and his use of onomatopoeia, which are perceived as foreign by writers in other cultures, allow these writers to explore forms of foreignness in their own culture. In this way, Bürger’s sometimes coarse language gives rise to moments of folk poetry that oscillate between the individual and the universal. The article concludes by suggesting that this simultaneity of contradictions is an essential structural principle of European Romanticism.